Modernizing Thailand’s Coinage
“Thailand began to modernize to keep up with the international market.”
IT WAS KING MONGKUT who had the first Siamese flat coins put into circulation.
The King was being bothered by the British, who were always angling for better deals and warning them about the French. He clearly saw that his country was in an adapt or die situation. The trick was to do the modernizing without losing sovereignty.
On the one hand was local politics, which is to say nobles with their own assets and armies, and traditional ways of doing things. On the other hand, the Europeans obviously had better military stuff, and all these other things they did differently than in Siam. Hard to tell what the good stuff was and what was just exotic foreign habits.
Guns and gunships and railroads were obvious, the King of Siam obviously needed those. And to get the money to buy those things he would need to be selling things to the Europeans. Siam could do its commerce the old way, with nepotism and squeeze and shaky private contracts, or they could join the system, with its checks and balances.
